What isTaneka Studio
About Taneka Studio
Taneka Studio is a research and design studio grounded in sound, textile, spatial, and agricultural experimentation. Centred in Benin and unfolding across West Africa and beyond, the studio moves between sonic composition, garment-making, installation, and ecological materiality -- merging ancestral craft with future-driven form to create wearable installations, sonic architecture, and immersive narration.
Rooted in land, memory, and ancestral continuity -- and with a current focus on farm-grown, plant-dyed textiles -- Taneka Studio works both independently and in collaboration with artisans, growers, and cultural workers to produce garments, objects, experiences, and sonic works that function as archives, expressions, and environments.
Sound becomes texture. Cloth becomes message. Space becomes score. Agriculture becomes material foundation.
Named in homage to the Taneka region of northern Benin -- a place known for architectural intelligence and layered histories -- the studio resists fast aesthetics and fixed categories.
Founded by Oscar Ngu Atanga, Taneka Studio is a vessel for design and creation as story and signal -- where process, exploration, and cultural depth shape form.
About Oscar Atanga
Oscar Atanga is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and farmer working through sound, material, and spatial practice. Born in Manchester, UK to Cameroonian parents, his work moves between sonic composition, performance, field recording, textile and garment design, installation, curation, and regenerative agriculture.
Rooted in land, memory, and embodied knowledge, his practice is shaped by extensive travel and exchange across West Africa, Europe, and Asia, alongside an artistic career forged in Berlin. He draws on African architectural intelligence, diasporic sonic traditions, and textile technologies, while time spent in India, Nepal, Japan -- and within Berlin’s experimental communities -- has refined his approach to material, movement, and site-responsive thinking.
For Oscar, farming is both material source and metaphysical grounding -- cultivating soil and threading continuity.
His work is guided by research, instinct, and lived experience, drawing deeply from the emotional expressiveness of the blues, the radical freedom of diasporic improvisation, and the experimental spirit of sound system culture.
Oscar's work has been supported and presented across galleries, cultural institutions, and experimental performance contexts.